I have been really looking forward to the Wings Over Wairarapa airshow, which was held today. Even the weather had been cooperative with nice days and [fairly] light winds over the past week or so.
Getting up today, the 2000' wind was up to around a 40 knot nor-westerly and the hills between Wellington and Masterton were topped with clouds :-(, hence the need to take a departure around the south-east of the hills [perhaps you can see an issue here...]. On the plus side, I got to swap planes, when 4 people bailed on the trip, and I got to fly a PA28-181 instead of a PA38-112 and took 3 passengers instead of 1. Yippee! The extra performance would be very helpful in the conditions.
The trip to Masterton was eventful. Turbulence was not as bad as it could have been [but still enough to keep me on my toes], but flying to the south-east of some hills in a strong nor-westerly was always going to make for a fun flight. If all this sounds familiar, it's probably because they are similar conditions to the
last time I flew to Masterton for an airshow :-) Darn!!
Anyway, we got there and back. The airshow, which I will detail in future posts, was OK. The absence [due to a wheels up landing] of the Spitfire Mk IX was unfortunate, but the lack of any military "heavy metal" [apart from the Kaman Seasprite helo] was very disappointing - especially since all of the advertising material indicated the presence of both a P3 Orion and a Boeing B757. Some of the World War One aircraft appeared to be grounded due winds, but such is life I guess.
What follows are a few sample images. There are many many more that will posted over the next few days, so enjoy!
The pictures are as follows.
Piper PA28-181, ZK-TDJ - the aircraft I flew to the show.
de Havilland DH.115 Vampire
F4U Corsair
Harvard
Yak 52
UH1 Iroquois
Pacific Aerospace CT4/E
Taylor Monoplane U/L, ZK-FNR
